Cassius Dio's Forgotten History of Early Rome

In a radical change of approach, Cassius Dio’s Forgotten History of Early Rome illuminates the least explored and understood part of Cassius Dio’s enormous Roman History: the first two decads, which span over half a millennium of history and constitute a quarter of Dio’s work. Combining literary and historiographical perspectives with source-criticism and textual analysis for the first time in the study of Dio’s early books, this collection of chapters demonstrates the integral place of ‘early Rome’ within the text as a whole and Dio’s distinctive approach to this semi-mythical period. By focussing on these hitherto neglected portions of the text, this volume seeks to further the ongoing reappraisal of one of Rome’s most significant but traditionally under-appreciated historians

The Republican Dictatorship: an Imperial Perspective

This chapter proposes to look at one of the less studied aspects of Cassius Dio’s narrative of the decline of the Republic, namely the dictatorship. It argues that, in keeping with his especial interest in the Republic’s institutions and constitutional framework, Dio believed that the collapse of the res publica and emergence of Augustus’ Principate was intimately connected to the failures—constitutional, practical, and reputational—of Rome’s emergency magistracy. It shows that as a monarchist, Dio believed that the Republic could only survive intact while it had a temporary recourse to legitimate and temporary monarchy under restrictions agreed by the community—dictatorship—and that this view perhaps emerges more from a reading of Cicero than from his fellow Greek historians. However, the failure of the dictatorship to inspire confidence in the wake of Sulla, especially in the 60s and 50s BCE, as well as its practical and legal restrictions, led to a greater number of corrosive extraordinary commands and other destructive innovations. The solution, for Dio, ultimately lay in Augustus, who (like Pompey) recognised the flaws in the dictatorship and found different ways to define his power

Resilience and student wellbeing in Higher Education: A theoretical basis for establishing law school responsibilities for helping our students to thrive

There is widespread concern for the mental wellbeing of our students. We argue that, while resisting the neoliberal tendencies that contribute to this, we have a responsibility for helping our students to thrive. Rooted in a theory of positive psychology: self determination theory, we present methods which may help us in this endeavour. These include our approaches to marketing and recruitment, curriculum design, assessment and feedback, experiential learning and developing a safe learning environment. We suggest how addressing these areas of our practice may assist students to develop their competence, and to experience autonomy and relatedness during their programmes of learning. In so doing we provide sources which underpin our arguments and which, we hope, will encourage a debate across European law faculties on this important topic

Fictitious Speeches, Envy, and the Habituation to Authority: Writing the Collapse of the Roman Republic

In this paper, I explore Cassius Dio’s use of his speeches as a means of historical explanation. From an analysis of several speeches of the Late Republic and how they are consonant with the narrative material surrounding them, I argue that Dio made these compositions consistent with a causal framework that he applied to the decline of the res publica. This framework appears to be distinctively the historian’s own.These compositions, I suggest, were embedded within Dio’s account of these years to explain the causes, and consequences, of two fundamental historical problems. The first is the ‘habituation to command’ (imperii consuetudo) of ambitious commanders; the second is the centrality of envy (φθóνος) to political life. I demonstrate that although these issues do not disappear entirely from Dio’s later account, the historian viewed them as especially Late Republican and as historically significant drivers of constitutional change. Even where they are demonstrably fabricated, Cassius Dio nevertheless used the speeches to reflect upon these issues, to predict their later political ramifications, and to posit remedies later followed by the Augustan Principate